I was told to make a thread for this and so I am.
I'm going to use as much detail as I can. And try to help you isolate the problem so you can help me.
I recently started playing the Sims 3 after a long time of having it on my shelf completely uninstalled. I missed the feeling of power that came with controlling their lives. After installing the most recent updates, I began playing and toying with new features and even some mods. Occasionally, an unimportant save would disappear. Giving me the outline of an uncreated family and my town name. The town would load instantly before saying that the game was unable to load the files. Recently, I made a game of myself and my friends and allowed things to take their course. (I won't give you the extreme details here). They began as teens. I made the Sim me die of starvation. My "best friend" received the Oh My Ghost! opportunity and revived my sim. I then moved them out and killed the human left to watch the Ghost me. Soon my sim-ghost started a relationship, moved in with his Romantic Interest, had her break up with her boyfriend. And Married her. They had a Ghost-Baby and I closed the game when they were all home. I saved the game approximately 7 or 8 times in total. Now, when I attempt to load it; I get the outline of the uncreated family, and when I hover over the file it reads "*town name* This file could not be read. It may have expansion pack data which is not available anymore". I have not installed any expansions, nor do I own any. All the tips say to delete the folder and rename the backup. I've done this many times and IT DOES NOT WORK. This is by far my favorite save file and I do not want to risk changing a single thing in the story progression. Please help me.
I have not touched any of the internal files, I use trustworthy mods, I've tried renaming the backup and deleting the save. Nothing works. So please help me with this problem.
